NURBS Modeling with Autodesk Maya

I want to address anybody with this course, not only people familiar with Maya. That’s why I start by (very briefly!) showing you ways to find your way around Maya. Later on you‘ll learn to locate the NURBS tools, create a NURBS torus and modify its NURBS-specific topology. Since cool surfaces need a good look, we‘ll talk about rendering. Finally, like at the end of each lesson, I suggest a homework to you. And I’ll reveal my humble way to do that homework at the beginning of the second lecture.

If, for Maya people not familiar with NURBS modeling, the pace of this lecture is too slow — be patient and bear with me. Things will speed up quite a bit in the next 11 chapters.

Almost every device built since the last decade of the 20th century is based on a more or less small set of NURBS curves. A car fender can be pre-visualized by spanning a surface across two curves. The curves need to be constructed appropriately, and the more you experiment with this procedure, the more you can foresee what kind of surfaces will be the result of your curves. The tool for the surface creation is called a LOFT. In this tutorial we‘ll create Lofts from curves. And as always, we end with a homework, a task for you.

The key to good looking and effective NURBS surfaces are intelligently chosen NURBS curves. In the previous lecture we created two or three curves to span a Loft between them. In this lecture we‘ll study the Revolve and Planar tools. Like always, there‘s homework for you at the very end. Enjoy!

Cool, sexy or pragmatic curves are the keys to industrial design and prototyping. In this lecture we‘ll explore ways to extract curves from existing geometry. As a side-effect, it‘s our first usage of a Polygon “primitive“. A sweet little task for your homework concludes this (and all other) lessons.

Image you want to create a highway in 3D, with its bents and tilts. In the NURBS world this is a matter of three simple steps: You create a curve (not a surface!) for the flow of your road. You create a cross section (=the width profile) of that road. And you use the Extrude tool to finalise the task. In this lecture I show you the rich options of the extrusion, and the reasons why it is not trivial to use it. We‘ll also talk in detail about the components of NURBS curves. And about lighting and rendering. Homework awaits you! 

When I studied NURBS modeling in the late 1990s, I ran into problems with complexity: My curves were too complex, and the resulting surfaces lacked of an elegant flow of lines and were too complex to handle. You can design the chassis of a car with just six (!) curves — you don‘t need 20 curves.

In this lecture you learn to model a bathtub from just three curves. The Birail tool is ideal for this. Later in this course we‘ll cover almost all NURBS tools. But studying the Loft, the Revolve, the Planar, the Extrude and now the Birail tools is key to cool design. At the end I‘ll give you homework — the first homework where you choose the tool.

In the first six parts of this course you basically learnt all the tools you need to —not get started, but to achieve amazing results. There are many 3D artists who rely on those tools only. However, there‘s a whole world of tools for NURBS surfaces and curves (and for Polygon meshes) called “Deformers“. The deformer we start with is amazing by itself. Let my surprise you with some sculpting.

The bad news: NURBS surfaces cannot be cut. As opposed to Polygons (which love being cut) NURBS surfaces only function when intact. The good news: Of course, we can cut and intersect NURBS surfaces!

How? Technically by hiding certain parts of the surface. You don‘t need to know the tech specs in order to do nice cuts. And of course, the “trimmed“ surfaces look excellent!

The layout of surfaces is technically called its topology. NURBS are famous for their lean and clean topology, whereas Polygon meshes can be as harsh and locally detailed as you please. In this lecture I explain the difference of the two worlds of 3D modeling.

Now it‘s time for the wide variety of less prominent NURBS tools, such as connecting curves or adding detail to existing surfaces (by inserting “Isoparms“). There are much less NURBS tools than Polygon tools, but still so many that this is the longest lecture in this course. You don‘t have to remember them all, but it‘s important that you know that they do exist. Like always we end with a task for you to do as your homework. My personal solution will start lecture no. 11.

Almost every 3D object you find on the internet has a Polygon and not a NURBS structure. This, however, does not prevent us from transfering those objects into the NURBS world — and, after sweet modifications — maybe back to the Polygon world. At the centre of this lecture is a Polygon cat, which you find in the Maya “Content Browser“. We‘ll talk about its topology and re-model one of its legs into NURBS. A joyful homework waits for you at the end of this lesson. The last one in this course.

This lesson wraps up things you‘ve learnt in 11 lectures. We start with the Surface Fillet, we continue with some Textures and lights, and we chill out with a few modules in Maya which are not exactly NURBS related, but which you can use with NURBS. No homework this time. Keep modeling, visualising, prototyping!